Lyudmila Petrushevskaya renounced the title of laureate of the State Prize in protest against attempts to liquidate Memorial

The writer Lyudmila Petrushevskaya refused the title of laureate of the State Prize in protest against the attempts of the Prosecutor General’s Office to liquidate the Memorial society, “because President Putin handed me a badge, a box and a bouquet.” She published в Facebook.

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“I studied Spanish. I was named Dolores. This is my real name. From the word “suffering”. At the age of 15, I asked my mother to change this name in my passport, Soviet children in pioneer camps hounded me for it. I have always called myself Lucy.

When I grew up, I worked for the sound magazine Krugozor. She made records.

And I worked on the sound of that disc, which I had dedicated to a Spanish prisoner who spent 23 years in solitary. After the death of the dictator Franco, he was released and honored as a hero: he did not testify against his own.

He later testified while traveling around the world. They listened to him. They wrote a play about him and played it in theaters. I inserted a terrible recording into my disc (6 minutes): the cry of a child when the Tashkent earthquake began. His father checked the operation of the tape recorder, and this childish cry was recorded. And I also inserted a Spanish song there that I learned in the lessons:

Memoria, memoria, dolore-dolor.

Memory, memory, suffering-pain.

My record was banned. Then.

The Memorial is now being taken away from me, the memory of those convicted and executed, of those who were thrown under a truck and died of starvation, of those frozen in trucks on the way from camp to camp, of those tortured by torture in Lubyanka and Kolyma, of those who were recently slaughtered in the streets, in wagons and in the mile police. About those imprisoned on trumped-up, fake cases. About thousands of such prisoners, dangerous to the authorities.

Let the case of insulting the president be brought up against me again.

I renounce the title of laureate of the State Prize. Because President Putin handed me a badge, a box and a bouquet. For a play dedicated to those who did not return from the camps. For the memory of them.

He did not know why they gave me the title of laureate of the State Prize, he did not read my play “The Moscow Choir” and, although I invited him, did not come to the Theater of Europe for the play (how Gorbachev came with his wife +, and the Moscow Art Theater hall stood together with his President – for fifteen minutes he applauded the people on the stage and the great Oleg Efremov). It’s just that Putin handed me a certificate, a box with a badge and a bouquet.

Memory is a terrible thing, it turns out, for the current leaders, for Putin, since it is forbidden. Memorial. Well, me and my children will be banned. Their deeds, their texts. My books and plays. But Memory! “

Memorial International has been researching political repression in the USSR and modern Russia since 1992. It was preceded by the Moscow public group “Memorial”, which emerged in 1987. 12 october became knownthat the Prosecutor General’s Office applied to the Supreme Court with a demand to liquidate International Memorial due to numerous violations of the law on “foreign agents”. The Ministry of Justice entered International Memorial into the register of “foreign agents” in October 2016. Since then, the organization has been fined more than 20 times for not marking the “foreign agent”. The total amount of fines exceeded 6 million rubles.

In addition, the prosecutor’s office achieves the closure of the Memorial Human Rights Center. One of the reasons for the liquidation of the supervisory department of Moscow called the justification of extremism and terrorism.

Human Rights Council under the President of Russia named the demand of the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office about liquidation Memorial International and Memorial Human Rights Center unjust and disproportionate violation.